B is for….. BEACH

It doesn’t take long to walk to the beach from here.  I often walk down there with Merlin.  As we get nearer it gets more windy.  Even on a still day here, it is breezy on the beach.  I love the feel of the sea breeze on my face.  It feels really fresh and wakes me up, feeling like it’s doing me a whole lot of good, but of course it is not good for the skin!

I can see more sky. I love the huge expanse of sky, it’s form and colour changes every moment of every day.  I love the vast amount of light down there. It fills me with light – I feel lighter, brighter.  Even on a dull day there is so much light on the beach – an enormous expanse of sky and reflected off the sea itself.

I guess I am used to the smell as I don’t usually consciously  notice it, unless it’s been particularly stormy and there’s lots of seaweed.  Sometimes I can taste the salt on the wind.

I love the colours, I love the washed out beiges, creams and browns of the pebbles, interspersed with the dark blues and blacks of the flints.  The sand itself is a biscuit colour and the seaweed can be a whole rainbow of colours!  The sea is a different colour every day, depending on the weather and the sky.  It varies from deep, deep, blue to grey, brown, pale blue, silver and gold.  I’d love to be able to paint it – but how to begin?  I guess I’d have to look really carefully to see the real colours, not the illusion, to be able to translate them from paint palette to paper.

Sometimes it is oh so quiet on the beach.  On quiet days the wavelets just tickle the shore.  Lovely!  I might hear the rush of the wind and the crashing of the waves.  If it is high tide and it’s stormy it is very noisy.  The waves crash onto the pebbles and drag them back.  The sucking of the pebbles back down the beach is the loudest.  The wind rushes past my ears and it’s hard to hear the music from my MP3 player.